A Virtual Palm Sunday

As Palm Sunday nears in Christian calendars (April 5 in most western traditions and April 12 in most Orthodox traditions), most of us will be celebrating the parade in socially-distanced seclusion. The Washington Post reported March 31 that U.S. deaths attributed to the Covid-19 virus have exceeded 3,000, more than the number of people killed in the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. As the virus slithers around the globe, billions are taking drastic measures both to avoid exposure to the virus and to avoid exposing others. People now sheltered in their homes are following government guidelines to stay there. Persons of conscience will not budge out of their homes except for urgent needs which, most ethicists agree, do not include excess toilet paper.

As a result, U.S. churches have been empty since early March. Many pastors have attempted - with varying degrees of success - to bring their congregations together electronically by telephone conference calls, FaceTime, Skype, and Zoom meetings.

But - and it is a big but - it's difficult to see how traditional Palm Sunday processions through neighborhoods and into churches will work on Zoom. Whatever happens, Palm Sunday is not going to be the same this year.

Happily, there is one tradition that is still available to us: the Ignatian practice of using our imaginations to place ourselves in the midst of bible scenes. It's a game of pretend on a high order, but it's extremely satisfying if your imagination is up to it. There you are, a wedding guest in Cana, raising another cup of the marvelous new wine. There you are on the mount, cupping your ears to hear the words of Jesus float down the hill. And if you can't imagine yourself requiring a change of underwear when Jesus orders Lazarus out of the tomb, you need to try harder.

This year, the best Palm Sunday parades will be in our heads. Close your eyes and imagine the crowds ripping fronds from the palm trees and waving them in jubilation. Listen to the people shouting their vociferous but, as it turns out, shallow hosannas. And watch as Jesus makes his way through the bustle of crowd, riding on an ass.

An ass? If you use your imagination to the fullest, this image alone will seem strange. Jesus, the Messiah, the son of God, riding on a silly beast of burden? And once that image is fixed anew in your mind's eye, your fancy may take you further than you have ever gone.

You may find yourself asking new questions. For example, why didn't Jesus walk?

And if he didn't walk, why ride on an ass? Why not a horse?

Most likely you will suppress that image quickly because most people have difficulty imagining Jesus on Trigger.

I think Jesus chose not to walk because that would have placed him on the same level as everyone else, just another pilgrim in the dense Passover crowd. That would have made him virtually invisible unless he was a lot taller than everyone else, which - if so - was not mentioned in the bible. If an average size Messiah required a triumphant entry into Jerusalem, he had to ride in on some conveyance that set him apart from the crowd. Strolling wouldn’t do it. A cart ride would have been silly. A chariot would have been out of the question. 

So why not a horse?

Horses don’t make a lot of appearances in the bible, unless they are the stuff of visions, such as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. But horses were surely common in Jerusalem and would easily overcome sheep and goats in the excremental sweepstakes. According to a cache of credible Internet information, riders of the Roman Equites Legionis were used as scouts, messengers, and defensive screens when soldiers were surrounded by overwrought Goths. Horses also served to make Roman officers look big and scary. 

Horses were beasts of war. Any king who rode a horse through the streets of an ancient city had either already conquered or was signaling his intention to take the city by force of arms.

This is hardly an image fit for the Prince of Peace.

In ancient times, the donkey was regarded as an animal of peace, and on the first Palm Sunday the pacific intentions of a king on a donkey were unmistakable to the teeming crowds.

The donkey also provided another advantage for Jesus. A person straddling a donkey attracts more attention than someone merely walking, but that person is not lifted too high above the crowd. Seated on a donkey, Jesus was accessible to the masses. They could reach out to touch him as he passed. The donkey permitted him to pass through the people as one of them, not as a king on a horse whose prancing hooves would frighten them out of the way. 

It’s obvious that Jesus had given careful thought to the sermon he wanted to preach by riding on the donkey. Somehow he knew a donkey had already been arranged for him in a suburb of Jerusalem before they entered the city.

When they were approaching Jerusalem, at Bethphage and Bethany, near the Mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples and said to them, 

“Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately as you enter it, you will find a colt that has never been ridden; untie it and bring it. If anyone said to you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ just say this: ‘The Lord needs it and will send it back here immediately.’” (Mark 11:1-3)

One thing we might conclude by the promise to return the creature unscathed is that used donkeys do not depreciate in value during a test-drive.

Another thing we might conclude is that Jesus knew exactly how the sermon on the donkey would be remembered through the millennia. Neither a horse nor a stroll on foot would say it as clearly: here, on a humble ass, is the monarch of the universe, who was in the beginning with God, who took on human flesh to experience all the joys, pains and travails of humanity, who was one of us, who came to rescue us from sin, who came in peace to reconcile us with the God we had rejected.

It’s impossible to envision Jesus on the donkey and mistake him for a shock-and-awe conqueror. He rode on the ass through the streets of Jerusalem to say, my time is near. Raise your palms and spread your cloaks before me as signs you know who I am. Then depart in peace and ponder this revelation in your hearts. Leave the violence and flogging and crucifying to others.

Five days later, we know, the fickle frond wavers joined the vicious crowds to call for a brutal end to the sermon. They stood outside Pilate’s palace shaking their fists and chanting, “Crucify him.” 

It’s an excruciating story to hear every Passion Week, all the more so because it set a pattern of church brutality and carnage that has lasted to the present day. Even the peaceful donkey ride through Jerusalem was re-invented by the church as an opportunity for mayhem. According to another credible online source:

In the 16th and 17th centuries, Palm Sunday was marked by the burning of Jack-o-Lent figures. This was a straw effigy which would be stoned and abused. Its burning on Palm Sunday was often supposed to be a kind of revenge on Judas Iscariot, who had betrayed Christ. 

What a travesty of the sermon Jesus was preaching, but less a mockery than other incidents of church history: the Crusades, stake burnings, beheadings, disembowelments, and other hideous tortures of Christians who didn’t believe what the Christians in power believed. 

Christian persecution of Christians continued relentlessly throughout the centuries. The Mennonite Martyrs’ Mirror records countless examples of Christian-on-Christian cruelty. 

For example, a Mennonite named Dirk Willems who was jailed for heresy by his Dutch Lutheran neighbors in 1569, and sentenced to die. Willems escaped from jail and was hotly pursued by angry Lutherans, one of whom fell through thin ice and was about to drown. Willems, a true Christian to the end, stopped running  and pulled the man to safety. It was just enough time for the crowd to catch up with him. They arrested Willems and burned him at the stake. 

No wonder we cannot repeat Tertullian’s Apology without snickering: “‘Look,’ they say, ‘how the Christians love one another, and how they are ready to die for each other.’” The quote is from an essay written in 200 C.E. And looking back, one wonders if it was ever true after that.

As we begin the last week of Lent, Passion Week, it will be good to reflect on these matters. Lent is a time of reflection and repentance. It’s a time to remind ourselves of the reasons Jesus came to us. It’s a time to recommit to the commandments Jesus said were the essential ingredients for human behavior: to love God with our heart, mind and soul, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

Jesus expressed all of this in the simple symbolism of riding a donkey through the gates of Jerusalem. 

And as we watch him in our minds eye, making that astounding passage one more time, may we remember the message he intended.

And may our imaginations allow us to join the cheering crowds in that cleansing refrain:

Hosanna!

Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!

Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David!

Hosanna in the highest heaven!

Then Who Can Be Saved?

Thanks to Pastor Jim O'Hanlon for the opportunity to preach March 1 at Saint Paul's Lutheran Church.

In today’s Gospel reading in Mark, a rich man asks Jesus for the path to eternal life. Mark says he was so eager to hear the answer that he ran up to Jesus and knelt before him.

But the man is disappointed. He may have been expecting the roving rabbi to tell him he was well on his way to heaven. Instead, Jesus tells him that the best way to close the deal is to sell all he has, give the proceeds to the poor, and follow Jesus.

Matthew adds (19:20) that the man is young, and that is the image most of us have of this unnamed salvation seeker. In North Baptist Church in Port Chester there is a copy of Heinrich Hofmann’s famous picture of “Christ and the Rich Young Ruler” showing the young man turning his head away in disappointment as he places his hand despairingly on his hip. Martha and I like that picture because our daughter Katie often strikes that resentful pose when we tell her she can’t have a second piece of cake. Hofmann captures the universal human reaction when we are told we can’t get what we want – at least not easily.

Both Mark and Matthew report that the salvation seeker went on his way grieving because, we are left to assume, there was no way he was going to give up his temporary luxury for eternal life.

Too, there is Jesus’ famous clincher that it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to get into heaven. (Mark 10:24).

Of course Jesus was kidding. Right?

Scholars have tried for millennia to figure out what Jesus meant, sometimes pointing out that the Aramaic words for “camel” and “rope” sound alike, or that wooden needles used to thread tents were fairly large. I tend to think he was using a preposterous hyperbole to drive his point home, and perhaps he was making a joke. If you read this passage about camels getting through needles to a group that has never heard it before, such as a third grade class, they will laugh.

During my undergraduate years at Eastern University in the sixties and seventies, I recall many spirited discussions between evangelicals and social-gospelers about whether a rich person could achieve a heavenly reward. We shrugged off the camel-through-a-needle analogy as hyperbolic humor on Jesus’ part, and we noted his codicil that “with God all things are possible.” What was harder to explain away was Jesus’ assertion that the rich man had to sell his many possessions and give his money to the poor, because it didn’t sound like he was kidding.

In point of fact, theological issues rarely got solved at Eastern Baptist College. In many ways, the social divisions of the sixties took on an odd confluence at Eastern where the biology department explained creation in the literal terms of the Genesis account, while the religion department insisted God’s creative modus operandi was evolution.

While we undergraduates were arguing camels and needles, we sometimes failed to notice that the bible offers little comfort to the rich. Jesus routinely lambasted persons of wealth.

Especially unpleasant is Luke’s anecdote of the rich man who basks in luxury, scarcely noticing Lazarus, the wretched beggar who is dying of hunger and psoriatic ulcers beneath his table. Lazarus dies and goes to heaven, while the rich man dies and is consigned to the torments of hell. The rich man is condemned because he lived in luxury and never gave a moment’s thought to the suffering poor. (Luke 16:19-31). 

Bad news for billionaires. Bad news for Trump and Bloomberg and Steyer. Bad news for Ken Copeland and Creflo Dollar.

And bad news for most of us. Because millions of us who fall far short of the celebrated one percent are nevertheless richer by modern standards than any first century fat cat could possibly imagine.

Worse, many of us in that category are as indifferent to the 45 million U.S. residents who live below the poverty line as the rich man was indifferent to Lazarus.

These are biblical warnings we should keep in mind the next time we wait hopefully in line to buy multi-million dollar lottery tickets. There’s almost no chance we would win, of course, but what if we did win? It would ruin our lives. To be rich would be a terrible fate.

The other-worldly fate of the rich – almost certain hellfire – is sobering, but perhaps it is too finely drawn. Also dubious is the blissful eternity assigned to the poor. It’s too easy to take these verses and design a dialectic that all rich people are hell bound. And it is equally wrong to anesthetize desperately poor people with a promise of pie in the sky when they die.

Perhaps the message Jesus was conveying to the rich young ruler is that his good deeds and his meticulous following of God’s law are not the path to salvation.

The path to salvation was his faith, which he could not earn and could not buy. Faith is not something you ask for; faith is something God grants to each of us through God’s loving grace. As Luther put it, faith is the act of believing God’s promises.

The young man who came to Jesus could not be saved by his good works or his obedience to God’s law; and Jesus reminded him he had no need for earthly riches, either. God who loved him unconditionally would take care of him.

Martin Luther systematically excised biblical books he didn’t like, declaring them “Apocrypha”. In particular, Luther didn’t care for the letter of James, which he called “an epistle of straw.” 

Luther objected to the church’s habit of extorting “good works” from its beleaguered congregations for its own profit, and he declared that a gospel of works was a tool of the devil.

Given the corruption of the church in Luther’s day, it’s hard to disagree with him.

In our day, however, James seems to be raising urgently legitimate questions:

“What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” (James 2:14-17.)

That’s another way of saying that if one truly has faith, good works must follow automatically. There can be no good works in the absence of faith. And if faith is present, good works cannot be stifled.

That’s a sobering thought for any faithful Christian who has stepped over a sleeping homeless person or brushed off a hungry pan-handler, as I have done and so many do.

But most of us ignore human needs far greater than that and assuage our guilt in precisely the fashion James warns us about: by praying for the desperate, as if to invite them to “keep warm and eat your fill.”

But for persons of faith, this good work should have been automatic. Naturally we have been praying earnestly for poor and endangered people, but some Christian leaders propose direct action – faith-based good works that can save lives. Pope Francis opened the doors of the Vatican to shelter families of refugees “fleeing death,” and he has called in Catholic parishes, convents, and monasteries across Europe to do the same.

There are, of course, an abundance of crises at home and abroad that cry out for us to prove the bona fides of our faith through good works.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 45 million persons in the U.S. live below the poverty line, and most of them need more than our advice to keep warm and eat their fill. 

A 2012 speech by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon could be both a prayer list and a call to action for persons of faith:

“Projections indicate that in 2015 more than 600 million people worldwide will still be using unimproved water sources, almost one billion will be living on an income of less than $1.25 per day, mothers will continue to die needlessly in childbirth, and children will suffer and die from preventable diseases. Hunger remains a global challenge, and ensuring that all children are able to complete primary education remains a fundamental, but unfulfilled, target that has an impact on all the other Goals. Lack of safe sanitation is hampering progress in health and nutrition, biodiversity loss continues apace, and greenhouse gas emissions continue to pose a major threat to people and ecosystems. The goal of gender equality also remains unfulfilled, again with broad negative consequences, given that achieving the MDGs depends so much on women’s empowerment and equal access by women to education, work, health care and decision-making.”

Most of the world’s churches have endorsed the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals that were originally set to alleviate these problems by 2015.

Some economists, including Dr. Jeffrey David Sachs of Columbia University, point out that a nation as rich as the United States has within its means the ability to wipe out all poverty on earth.

But a good work of that magnitude will require a lot more faith than we can muster by ourselves.

We don’t need the parable of Lazarus and the rich man to remind us that God expects God’s people, saved by God’s grace, to be alert to the needs of the poor and suffering peoples around us.

You and I may not be essential parts of God’s plan to end the poverty that kills in our nation and around the world. And you and I may not be called to sell all we have to aid the poor.

But God does expect us to heed Jesus’ invitation to the rich young ruler: “Follow me.”

Because Jesus has already paid the price of the sin that causes us to be indifferent to the suffering around us.

Jesus called upon the rich young ruler to remember: God does not need his good works, but the young man’s neighbors do. And if he follows Jesus, he will discover he can stop obsessing about himself and his personal needs; and he will discover on his own what he needs to do to help the poor around him.

It may seem like a tall order to accept that kind of grace.

But, as Jesus said, “With God, all things are possible.